A Tale for Children of Braving Soviet Tyranny

By

Meghan Cox Gurdon

Updated March 19, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

There's no shortage of books for young readers about Nazism and the Holocaust—and that's as it should be. Children, at a certain age, ought to begin learning about the ghastly events that unfolded in Europe during World War II. For memoirists and novelists, the era continues to provide limitless terrain for imaginative exploration.

It's odd, then, that so few books have dealt with contemporaneous events a little farther east, where Nazism ended and Soviet communism began. The horrors visited on the captive peoples of the Soviet Union—mass deportations, enslave ment in camps, the erasure of entire nations—would seem as rich a source for stories of suffering and triumph and political lesson-teaching. Yet what happened behind the Iron Curtain has gone largely unremarked in the pages of children's literature.

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Between Shades of Gray

By Ruta Sepetys Philomel, 344 pages, $17.99

Until recently, virtually the only accounts for English-speaking children were Anne Holm's 1965 novel, "North to Freedom" (also published under the title "I Am David"), about a Bulgarian boy who escapes from a Soviet concentration camp, and Esther Hautzig's slim but excellent memoir of her Polish family's exile to Siberia, "The Endless Steppe," which was first printed in 1970.

But perhaps now the subject is beginning to get its due. The past few years have seen the arrival of several books for young readers depicting harsh communist realities. These include "The Wall," Peter Sis's 2007 picture-book memoir of his youth in Cold War Prague; Anne Fine's 2008 young-adult novel, "The Road of Bones," set in a vaguely Stalinist era; and Haya Leah Molnar's 2010 chronicle of her girlhood in communist Romania, "Under a Red Sky."

Now comes Ruta Sepetys's "Between Shades of Gray," a superb though grueling novel for readers over the age of 13. We see events through the eyes of Lina, an artistic 15-year-old Lithuanian girl whose promising future is violently altered when she and her family are rounded up and deported. It is 1941, and Stalin has ordered a purge of all suspected "anti-Soviet" elements—doctors, lawyers, artists, businessmen, professors—from the annexed Baltic states.

As in Esther Hautzig's firsthand account of deportation to Siberia, this fictional one begins in an elegant home with the sound of hammering on the door. Soviet police barge in, barking orders for Lina's family to pack up and leave. Hustled with her mother and brother and anguished neighbors into the back of a truck, Lina is frantic with worry about her father, who disappeared earlier. The truck unloads the terrified party into the confusion of a railway depot, where Russian guards indifferently separate families and abuse anyone who resists them. Shoved into dirty cattle cars, the Lithuanians soon find themselves trundling toward the labor camps of Siberia. "I pictured a rug being lifted," Lina tells us, "and a huge Soviet broom sweeping us under it."

Ms. Sepetys's prose is wonderfully uncluttered and sometimes beautiful, but she does not flinch from depicting Soviet cruelties, and that makes some passages rather harrowing. Parents of younger children may want to consider introducing "The Endless Steppe" first, for readers around age 11, and then move to "Between Shades of Gray" a few years later.

In an afterword, Ms. Sepetys reminds us that Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia vanished from world maps until the Soviet Union disintegrated, not regaining their independence until 1991. As the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, she declares a particular interest in conserving memories of the hard communist years. She based many events in the novel on what she learned from her interviews with survivors and their families.

"Between Shades of Gray" and the other books in this tiny but perhaps widening historical niche are worth a young reader's time not just because they move or uplift (which they do). These volumes also give children the opportunity to develop as clear and educated an opinion about communism as they will have already formed about Nazism. And that's something worth having.

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